What's halfway between 1 and 9 ?

[Shiv Mathur]

Interesting little article here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-thomas/whats-halfway-between-1-and-9-kids-and-scientists-say-3_b_1982920.html

[Will]

Interesting article. It's fun to speculate on how we might view the world if our concept of digits (discrete ordinal counting symbols) expressed logarithmic change instead of linear.

[Hardy Heinlin]

The feeling of the duration of the past lifetime is not linear either.

When I was a kid, one year felt like an eternity.

When I was a teenie, one year felt like a decade.

Today, one year feels like a week.


|--|-|

[Hardy Heinlin]

We should establish new jubilee year intervals:

1 year
2 years
4 years
8 years
16 years
32 years
64 years
...


In the traditional 5 year interval system you don't have much to celebrate in the beginning, although so much exciting new events happen in the beginning. At later stages, jubilees become boring. They should be celebrated more seldom so that they remain something special.


Cheers,

01010

[Will]

There's lots of good information on the Mayan calendar available online. Not wanting to delve into the New Age misunderstandings, it is still worth noting that December 21, 2012, does represent the beginning of a new 5000-year interval, and that's interesting.

The Christian calendar is wonderful in its complexity. There are "solar" holidays that happen on fixed days within the solar 365-day year, such as Christmas (December 25) and the feast of the Transfiguration (August 6). But there is also an overlapping calendar of "lunar" holidays that are based on the phase of the moon, such as Easter (which is always the first Sunday following the first full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox) and Pentecost (which always occurs 50 days after Easter).

Ways of marking time are very interesting and appealing. I think we appreciate these yardsticks, or similar ones. They help us see ourselves in various types of meaningful contexts; they let us see ourselves in relationship to other people and in relationship to the ever-flowing stream of time.

[Hardy Heinlin]

Interesting subject, Will. This reminds me of some old questions I've been having for a very long time, questions that couldn't be answered by Wikipedia or any other Internet source.

For example:

Do Japanese have a 7-day week? If so, since when? The 7 occurs in abrahamic religions only.

All in all: Do cultures -- who originally used systems not based on 7 days or 24:60:60 hours:minutes:seconds -- also use another traditional time system in parallel?

We, who use this 7 day system, consider it a matter of course when  communicating with other people around the globe. Were the european abrahamic imperialists in the last 1000 years so convincing that every culture accepted this system without resistance? Or did some people have similar ideas at different places, by pure coincidence, several thousand years before?

Who invented the 24/60/60 system?


Cheers,

|-|ardy

[Will]

Great questions, Hardy. I don't know anything about the Japanese days of the week, but in China, they use a 7-day week with the days called "day one," "day two," "day three," and so on. Wednesday = Mittwoch = "day three." The Chinese have no special names beyond that. I'm going there this Thursday ("day four") and I'll ask around and see if anyone knows how and why they started counting week days that way.

[Hardy Heinlin]

"Japanese" was just a rhetorical variable. You may replace it by any other culture that has no abrahamic-religious tradition.


P.S.: We have a subforum here called Hangar 7. That is another subject, hehe. Pure coincidence! :-)

[Will]

I checked Wikipedia, and they say that the 7-day week started in pre-Christian times, apparently at the same time in the Jewish world and in Babylonia. Both divided time into a recurring series of 7-day cycles (roughly) between full moons. I suppose if the moon is on a 28-day cycle, a 7-day week becomes more intuitive.  

They don't have much information about Japan and China, but they say there's evidence that China was using a 7-day week as far back as the 4th century, which would be before they had any contact with the Western world. The Japanese transitioned about 1000 years ago.  Interesting stuff.

[Hardy Heinlin]

I suppose if the moon is on a 28-day cycle, a 7-day week becomes more intuitive.

Ah, yes, that makes sense.

[Tetsuo]

Before 19th century, we Japanese used lunar calender with 6-day cycle .
Every month begins with a new moon,and 15th is always under a full moon.
Since 1872,the solar calender with 7-day week has been used in Japan.  

[Tetsuo]

Please check.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar

[Avi]

I suppose if the moon is on a 28-day cycle...

The moon is 29.5 days cycle.
A Jew and Muslim year is 12 moon months and a month is once 29 days and once 30 days.
That means a Jew and Muslim year is shorter by about 11 days than the Christian year.
The Muslims leave it that way so their holidays are "traveling" on the Gregorian calendar (once the Ramadan can be is the summer and few years later in the winter).
Many of the Jewish holidays are connected to the years seasons so we add a full month every 2 or 3 years (total of 7 months in 19 years) to adjust the calendar to the seasons.

[Phil Bunch]

A lot of things in people's physiology react in a logarithmic fashion, including many aspects of human visual sensitivity, hearing, etc, etc.  

Thus, I wonder if the sense of time being so non-linear isn't just another example of logarithmic response in action?  I believe the perception of time being so non-linear as described in others' posts was discussed in some detail in a Scientific American article some years ago.  Now that I've been retired for a few years, it really feels like a week only takes an hour to pass...maybe this is nature's way of expediting the often stressful passage through old age and into the afterlife!

[Hardy Heinlin]

Thanks, Tetsuo. Your link led me to another link that answers why (interesting) Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration#Motives


Cheers,

|-|ardy